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[1227a]
[1]
for even if it is
not precisely accurate, yet at all events it approximates to the truth
in a way. But we will
speak about this in our examination of justice.1 As to purposive
choice, it is clear that it is not absolutely identical with wish nor
with opinion, but is opinion plus appetition when these follow as a
conclusion from deliberation.

But since
one who deliberates always deliberates for the sake of some object,
and a man deliberating always has some aim in view with reference to
which he considers what is expedient, nobody deliberates about his
End, but this is a starting-point or assumption, like the postulates in the
theoretic sciences (we have spoken about this briefly at the beginning
of this discourse, and in detail in Analytics2); whereas with all men
deliberation whether technical or untechnical is about the means that
lead to their End, e.g. when they deliberate about whether to go to
war or not to go to war with a given person. And the question of means
will depend rather on a prior question, that is, the question of
object, for instance wealth or pleasure or something else of that kind
which happens to be our object. For one who deliberates deliberates if
he has considered, from the standpoint of the End, either what tends
to enable him to bring the End to himself or how he can himself go to
the End.3 And by nature the End is
always a good and a thing about which men deliberate step by
step
[20]
(for example a
doctor may deliberate whether he shall give a drug, and a general
where he shall pitch his camp) when their End is the good that is the
absolute best; but in
contravention of nature and by perversion not the good but the
apparent good is the End. The reason is that there are some things
that cannot be employed for something other than their natural
objects, for instance sight—it is not possible to see a
thing that is not visible, or to hear a thing that is not audible; but
a science does enable us to do a thing that is not the object of the
science. For health and disease are not the objects of the same
science in the same way: health is its object in accordance with
nature, and disease in contravention of nature. And similarly, by nature
good is the object of wish, but evil is also its object in
contravention of nature; by nature one wishes good, against nature and
by perversion one even wishes evil.

But
moreover with everything its corruption and perversion are not in any
chance direction, but leads to the contrary and intermediate states.
For it is not possible to go outside these, since even error does not
lead to any chance thing, but, in the case of things that have
contraries, to the contraries, and to those contraries that are
contrary according to their science.4 It
therefore necessarily follows that both error and purposive choice
take place from the middle point to the contraries (the contraries of
the middle being the more and the less).—And the cause is
pleasure and pain; for things are so constituted that the pleasant
appears to the spirit good and the more pleasant better, the painful
bad and the more painful worse.

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